Lin Nelson Benedek, a third generation Californian, lives in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains with her husband and son. She works as a psychotherapist and is a recent graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, where she had the great privilege of being mentored by Anna Journey, Dorianne Laux, Vievee Francis, Kwame Dawes and Sandra Alcosser. She aspires to write generous poetry—ecstatic and meditative, reverent and irreverent— and to speak from her soul about the sorrows and joys that make up our lives.